Designing a collaborative research web space: aims, plans and challenges of the Commodity Histories project
On Thursday 6th and Friday 7th September 2012, the first networking workshop for the Commodity Histories digital history project will be held at the Open University’s London Regional Centre, in Camden.
Call for Papers: American Society for Environmental History, 2013
On behalf of the program and local arrangement committees for the ASEH 2013 Conference taking place in Toronto 3-6 April, we would like to encourage scholars from all disciplines with an interest in historical relationships between nature and society to submit panels or roundtable proposals by 15 June 2012.
We are anticipating a lively and convivial gathering in one of the America’s most dynamic cities. The conference theme “Confluences, Crossings, and Power” calls attention to the ways that scholarly inquiries into human – environment relationships merge, intersect, and challenge anthropocentric approaches to history. We are eager for panels, roundtables, or posters that share original research, offer incisive syntheses of what the field has accomplished, or provoke scholars to consider what remains to be done.
The conference will be held in Toronto’s historic Fairmont Royal York hotel, a splendid railway hotel built in the 1920s. In addition, attendees will be able to participate in field trips to sites of interest in the Greater Toronto area, including Hamilton harbour, the McMichael collection of Canadian art, aboriginal archaeological sites in Toronto, and Niagara Falls.
Don’t hesitate to direct questions to the program committee.
Colin Coates John Soluri
York University Carnegie Mellon University
New Directions in Global History Conference
27-29 September 2012
St. Antony’s College, Oxford
Global history has established itself over the last ten years as a powerful and dynamic sector in historical research with wide appeal to an informed lay readership outside the academy. Now is the time to take stock. This is partly to ask what have been the most fruitful lines of inquiry and the most productive approaches. But it is also to speculate on which new directions global history is likely to follow and what we should see as the most urgent or important new lines of inquiry.
For its Founding Conference, Oxfords new Centre for Global History will engage with these questions across the whole chronological range from Ancient to Late Modern History. We have invited some of the foremost practitioners in the field to debate these issues. We expect that among the major themes to emerge will be how global history can connect with and serve different kinds of history, how it can benefit both from a dialogue across chronological periods and from cross-disciplinary research, and whether conceptual innovation should be a major priority.
Plenary speakers include Nicholas Purcell, Arjun Appadurai, Kenneth Pomeranz, Linda Colley, Chris Bayly, Ian Morris, Bob Moore, Kevin ORourke, John McNeill, Maxine Berg, Jurgen Osterhammel, Francis Robinson, Chris Wickham and James Belich.
To find out more and register, visit www.history.ox.ac.uk or email global@history.ox.ac.uk
Claire Phillips (Centre Administrator)
University of Oxford Centre for Global History
By Jim Clifford and Colin Coates
We are embarking on a new research project, supported by a Digging into Data grant, to investigate the environmental and economic histories of the rapid expansion of commodity frontiers and trade in the British Empire and Canada during the nineteenth century. This is a unique opportunity to work with leading computational linguists and visualization specialists in Scotland and to experiment with new digital methods of historical research. In the process we hope both to assess the value of data mining for asking new questions from the growing digital archive and advance our knowledge of the growing importance of commodities in the British Empire and Canada during a period of rapid economic and environmental transformation.
The term “globalization” has become a catchphrase for current times, and the increasing exchange of ideas and goods is held to be a hallmark of contemporary society. Yet some economic historians point out that the late nineteenth century witnessed another key period of economic globalization. Transnational trade, often conducted within the formal and informal bonds of imperial influences, focused on a growing range of raw materials harvested from forests, plantations and mines. The global economy expanded as European and American nations colonized frontiers rich with natural resources. Because of the scale of demand from urbanizing and industrializing core economies, the extraction of these commodities led to noticeable, sometimes dire, environmental consequences.
Europeans began to reshape the global environment as they voyaged across the oceans, introducing plants and animals into new ecosystems, and transporting natural resources back to consumer markets at home. While this process started long before the nineteenth century, increased demands for a wide range of natural resources accelerated industrial activity. New transportation technologies and the concurrent expansion of European empires further intensified the pace of global trade in the second half of the nineteenth century.
This collaborative project between environmental historians in Canada and computational linguistics and computer science scholars in the UK will use text mining techniques to explore hundreds of thousands of pages of historical documents related to trade in the British Empire during the nineteenth century. Although our research will have a global scope, it will particularly emphasize the role of Canadian natural resources in the network of commodity flows. The data for our study will be large corpora of digitized documents from the period in question, and we will use information extraction methods to transform unstructured text into a relational database. This newly created digital resource will allow historians to discover new patterns and to explore new hypotheses, both through structured query and through a variety of visualization tools.
Our hope is to create a database accessible to others interested in the history of commodities. As we begin developing this project, we would like to hear from fellow historians with shared interests to help us develop a wide range of historical questions which will help shape the development of the database and the visualizations. Sandip Hazareesingh has already agreed to join the advisory board for this project, but we like to connect with more researchers in the Commodities of Empire network. Please contact Colin Coates and Jim Clifford: CCoates@glendon.yorku.ca and jim.s.clifford@gmail.com
http://tradingconsequences.blogs.edina.ac.uk
https://twitter.com/#!/digtrade
Teams: York University, Canada: Prof Colin Coates (PI), Dr Jim Clifford, Prof Gillian McGillivray University of Edinburgh, UK: Prof Ewan Klein (PI), Dr Claire Grover, Dr Beatrice Alex, Dr James Reid (EDINA) University of St Andrews, UK: Prof Aaron Quigley (PI)
Chios, one of the largest islands in the Eastern Mediterranean, became internationally known during the 13th century due to the production of the Chios mastic in twenty one villages on the south, the resin of the mastic tree (Pistacia lentiscus L. var. chia (Desf. ex Poiret) DC.), to which many beneficial properties and uses had already been attributed in the antiquity. The international demand for mastic led the various conquerors of Chios to prohibit free trade and lay down a system for monopoly distribution. After the island was conquered by the Ottoman Empire in 1566, following a period of almost two centuries of Genoan rule (1346 to 1566), the valuable product of Chios Mastic constitutes one of the monopolies of the Ottoman Empire.
For further information on chios mastic and chios mastic trade from the 17th through to the 19th Century visit
http://scholarspace.manoa.hawaii.edu/bitstream/handle/10125/21006/i1547-3465-08-153.pdf?sequence=1
Dr. Dimitrios G. Ierapetritis
Seminario Internacional
Cuba en los intereses anglo-hispanos
Reflexiones en el 250 aniversario de La Toma de La Habana
Primera Circular
Este Seminario se propone reabrir un debate, sin dudas polémico, sobre un acontecimiento que marcó, para gran parte de los estudiosos de la Historia de Cuba, una inflexión en el devenir de su economía, su quehacer político–militar y su vida cotidiana, éste hecho fue : La Toma de La Habana por los ingleses, en 1762.
En este evento científico se reflexionará sobre los intereses y acciones inglesas que incentivaron el ataque a la Habana y los que motivaron que españoles y criollos se unieran en su defensa. Resultará también de sumo interés poder debatir sobre el hecho de que mientras la gran mayoría de los sectores de la sociedad colonial presentaron una resistencia al ataque británico, miembros de ambos grupos se plegaron a los asaltantes y colaboraron con ellos durante su estancia en la capital. De gran utilidad será también repensar otros acontecimientos anteriores y posteriores a 1762, en los que se evidenció la lucha entre imperios por el dominio del Caribe.
Sin lugar a dudas, este encuentro ayudará a esclarecer la saga que en el imaginario colectivo aun subsiste sobre la perdida de La Habana. También pondrá en evidencia, con nuevas aportaciones, las herencias de estos contactos y relaciones anglo-cubanas a lo largo de la historia. Estos temas serán centro de atención del encuentro, propiciando que estudiosos cubanos y de diferentes latitudes confronten, en un clima académico, los diferentes criterios y nuevas tesis sobre dichos asuntos.
Es por todo ello que, teniendo en cuenta que en el próximo 2012 se cumplen 250 años de aquel acontecimiento trascendental, la Academia de la Historia de Cuba, con el coauspicio de las embajadas de España y del Reino Unido, en La Habana, la Oficina del Historiador de la Ciudad de La Habana, la Biblioteca Nacional de Cuba “José Martí”, el Centro de Altos Estudios “Fernando Ortiz” de la Universidad de La Habana, el Centro de Estudios Militares de las FAR, el Ministerio de las Fuerzas Armadas y el Complejo Histórico-Cultural “Morro-Cabaña”, convoca al Seminario Internacional:
Cuba en los intereses anglo-hispanos
Temas a Debate:
El seminario se celebrará en la primera semana del mes de Julio del 2012, y podrán participar en él todos los científicos sociales de profesión, cuyos sus resultados de trabajo en estos campos avalen su experiencia y dedicación al estudio de tan importante asunto.
Los interesados deberán enviar antes del 30 de abril del 2012 el título de su ponencia, un resumen de uno a dos párrafos en que argumente el asunto que tratará y la novedad que aportará su comunicación, además de una pequeña síntesis curricular. El Comité académico, conformado al efecto por miembros de nuestra Academia, estudiará las propuestas y hará una ajustada selección de aquellas comunicaciones que puedan contribuir al debate. Las ponencias seleccionadas serán dadas a conocer antes del 30 de mayo.
El Comité organizador no se compromete con el alojamiento de los participantes extranjeros, ni del interior del país, aunque pondrá a disposición de los mismos las ofertas de alojamiento que logre convenir con el buro de turismo y con las instituciones científicas y culturales cubanas que puedan colaborar con el hospedaje de profesores e historiadores cubanos, estos últimos con pago en moneda nacional.
La cuota de inscripción para participantes extranjeros será de 70 CUC y 70 pesos para los participantes cubanos. Los académicos de número, correspondientes y concurrentes que participen con ponencias no tendrán que abonar cuota alguna, no así los interesados de estas categorías que no presenten ponencias, estos deberán abonar 50 pesos y hacer una solicitud de participación como oyentes a la Comisión de Organización del Seminario, que responderá de acuerdo a las capacidades existentes en los salones de conferencias donde se celebrará el evento. Todos los participantes recibirán certificado.
Para enviar documentación o para evacuar dudas, podrán contactar al Comité Organizador a través del correo de La Academia de La Historia: academia.historia@ohc.cu, dirigido, para su entrega, al Comité Organizador del Evento, y especificando en el asunto: Ponencia a Evento ingleses o Consulta sobre Evento ingleses.
Comité Organizador:
Dr. Eduardo Torres – Cuevas
Dra. Mercedes García Rodríguez.
Dr. Gustavo Placer Cervera.
MSc. René González Barrios.
El Comité Académico, una vez seleccionado, será dado a conocer en una próxima circular sobre el evento.
A new research initiative is being developed, coming from the collaboration between Commodities of Empire (CoE) and the International Institute for Social History (Amsterdam) (IISH). The aim is to develop a historical comparison between the islands of Cuba and Java (and more broadly, between the Hispanic Caribbean and Indonesia), focusing on the commodity crops that both islands grew, and provided for the global market: sugar, tobacco and coffee.
Ulbe Bosma (IISH) and Jonathan Curry-Machado (CoE/ Institute for the Study of the Americas, London/ Wageningen University) have written a first paper, analysing the conditions that led Java and Cuba to become the prime cane-sugar exporters of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This currently being reviewed for publication in the New West Indian Guide. Jean Stubbs (CoE/Institute for the Study of the Americas) and Ratna Saptari (Leiden University) will follow this with a similar study of tobacco.
The intention is that these first essays into the comparative history will form the basis for establishing a comparative project, also including coffee. We anticipate making funding applicaitons over the coming year to this end.
The Commodities and Anticommodities research programme focuses on modes of indigenous production as sustainable practice and resistance against agrarian commercial capitalism in Africa, Asia and the Caribbean during the colonial era. It is based in the Technology and Agrarian Development Group, at the University of Wageningen (The Netherlands).
The introduction of commercial agriculture in colonised regions of the world is often considered as serving the interests of the colonisers at the expense of local populations, their knowledge and cultural identity. This programme takes a different approach, arguing that changes triggered by colonial introductions of commercial agriculture (‘commodity’) included forms of resistance against and creative responses to those changes that led to specific ‘indigenous’ forms of production (anti-commodity). By investigating and bringing together unexplored expressions and various examples of anti-commodity practices, the programme intends to shed new light on the impact of commercial agriculture in the colonial era and how it has affected agricultural changes in developing nations today.
The research team consists of:
We recently had the excellent news that the Commodities of Empire project has suceeded in securing an AHRC Research Networking grant. This has been awarded for the development of our digital history endeavours – primarily the establishment of an on-line research resource. The Commodity Histories website is one step towards this.
The grant will enable us to employ a digital humanities specialist to assist us in establishing the resource. We will also be holding two workshops (in 2012 and 2013). Further news of these will be posted here in due course.
An official British Academy Research Project, Commodities of Empire is a collaboration between the Open University’s Ferguson Centre for African and Asian Studies and the University of London School of Advanced Study’s Institute for the Study of the Americas.
Tobacco leaves in a drying shed. Photo by Mhall209, Flickr
The mutually reinforcing relationship between ‘commodities’ and ‘empires’has long been recognised. Over the last six centuries the quest for profits has driven imperial expansion, with the global trade in commodities fuelling the ongoing industrial revolution. These ‘commodities of empire’, which became transnationally mobilised in ever larger quantities, included foodstuffs (wheat, rice, bananas); industrial crops (cotton, rubber, linseed and palm oils); stimulants (sugar, tea, coffee, cocoa, tobacco and opium); and ores (tin, copper, gold, diamonds). Their expanded production and global movements brought vast spatial, social, economic and cultural changes to both metropoles and colonies. Continue reading
